Why was I still traveling? Was it purely because it was better than turning around and going home, where I would have to make grown-up choices about my future? Or was I waiting to happen...

This communal parenting brought me out of the privacy of our foreign enclave and into the public life of the community. Here, parenting was everyone’s responsibility; all adults were “aunties” and “uncles”.

Together we gazed out over corkscrew switchbacks cut through a barren, rocky landscape stretching to the horizon. It was simultaneously awesome and insane to be in this spot as a family, though, for a flicker...

Operating in the interstices of communist China society was at once exhilarating and uncertain. There were no rules. Or rather, there was only one rule: that nothing is allowed. But the corollary, which reveals the...

Thinking Reports enable the prisoners to wash their brains, and become new!” he announced cheerfully. “Washing the brain is very important to your reform, and improving your real situation.

It’s the bonds forged over baijiu, more than anything else, that keep me coming back for another ganbei despite the hiccups, figurative and literal. You can learn more about someone after three shots of baijiu...

The key to successful change is sensitivity towards that which is indigenous and, in the long run, diversity will always be more resilient than monoculture despite the current unsustainable trends in the opposite direction.

No wonder prostitution is so rampant in China, I mused as I watched the four girls watch us: why stand on your feet all day for slave wages when you can get rich on your...

Is China a drug? Like any drug, it depends entirely on the user’s own state of mind. If we’re making metaphors, for old China hands I’d imagine their time here draws parallels with the soaring...